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Ethnographers often study those who periodically meet to interact in multiple venues. This article focuses on how people who share and engage in tasks in recurrently-visited venues define and change their social projects’ problems and solutions. To address the complexities of this “meta-work,” I introduce the concept of “tethers.” Tethers are links across venues that people use to set and shift these problems and solutions that are continuously being contested. Drawing on examples from the author’s fieldwork and other ethnographic accounts of professional work, I examine three types of tethers: focal participants, things, and language. Paying attention to tethers also results in practical implications for taking fieldnotes, timing observations, and choosing fieldsites. I argue that a focus on subjects’ use of tethers across venues helps mitigate the challenges ethnographers face when accounting for the influence of temporally and geographically distant sites of recurrent interaction.

This paper uses the case of the uneven use of a robotic technology to explain how physicians with similar training come to engage in different medical practices. I develop a conceptual framework in which their decisions to use advanced technologies are informed by “interdependent career types,” a concept that incorporates features of the professional social context of physicians’ work and the expertise they use, and reflects how medicine distributes expertise via formal and informal referral structures. I draw on data regarding specialized physicians’ differentiated use of this technology over five years, as well as interviews with those who continue to use the technology and those who have abandoned it. I argue that interdependent career types stratify physicians’ standpoints on multiple dimensions of medical work – including those related to their concerns about reputation, inclinations towards risk, and preferences regarding the use of their bodies.

A classic question of social science is how knowledge informs practice. Research on physicians’ decisions about medical knowledge has focused on doctors’ personal capabilities and features of the knowledge corpus, producing divergent findings. This study addresses these findings by asking instead: how is decision-making about the use of knowledge influenced by specific features of work? From observations of one team’s decisions in multiple clinical and administrative contexts involving different tasks, I argue that the pattern for making specific decisions is contingent upon the length of feedback loops that are specified by the temporal features of physicians’ different tasks. Physicians receive feedback at different speeds depending on the temporal features of a task and they must account for these speeds when they judge what they can prioritize. This finding explains doctors’ perceived uncertainty in other studies as a product of the long feedback loop in tasks, and their certainty or pragmatism as a product of shorter feedback loops. In these short-feedback scenarios, physicians consult and deploy scientific knowledge after determining a profitable plan of action (and not exclusively before, as is usually assumed). This knowledge is deployed in “Bayesian Performances,” where studies are quoted as a credible warrant for pursuing projected outcomes.